Dream Office Challenge

[lbrandt]

Hello all,

I'm outfitting an in-home office almost from scratch for a friend. Would like to do as much wirelessly as possible - ethernet/USB wired OK as fallback. Price is secondary to integratability and functionality.

- Have a white i-book - two years old with airport card.
- Have cable modem access through Comcast
- Plan to buy a new iMac g5 with airport card and bluetooth.
- Need to serve a visiting guest PC or Mac with printing and perhaps other local services.
- Need either an all-in-one PDA/phone, or seperate PDA and phone which can sync with each other. Also need to sync to both Macs (bluetooth, I hope).
- Must provide live email while in meetings in US. IMAP rather than POP would be good to allow web mail access. Also desirable to work overseas (Europe and South/Central America).
- Need laser printer and inkjet color printer, either ethernet or wireless but in any case available to all local computers.
- Fax and photocopy would be nice to integrate on the local net.
- Don't know enough about Rendezvous to judge its usefulness.

Is it possible to make this all work without a degree in networking?
What configuration would *you* recommend?
Does anyone have such a working system?


Thanks for any advice.

[DanTekGeek]

for the phone/pda, i can reccomend nothing more highly than the treo 650. it should be out by mid october/november. check out the palmone treo 600 to see what it will be like. you would want a gsm treo, such as att, tmobile, or cingular, so as to be able to use it over seas. it will have bluetooth, and possibly wifi, but definatly gprs data.

[mseydel]

What type of business is the home office to be used for?
What are your security concerns?
What are your redundancy and backup needs for the systems?

I'd be concerned that the two Macs you mention have very little potential for expandability, though they color-coordinate nicely.
But even without answers to the above, I think your outfitting plan is definitely workable; sounds like fun...